Month: May 2014

Millions of people use Firefox for Android every day. It’s amazing to work on a product used by so many people. Unsurprisingly, some of those people send us feedback. We even have a simple system built into the application to make it easy to do. We have various systems to scan the feedback and look for trends. Sometimes, we even manually dig through the feedback for a given day. It takes time. There is a lot.

Your feedback is important and I thought I’d point out a few recent features and fixes that were directly influenced from feedback:

Help Menu
Some people have a hard time discovering features or were not aware Firefox supported some of the features they wanted. To make it easier to learn more about Firefox, we added a simple Help menu which directs you to SUMO, our online support system.

Managing Home Panels
Not everyone loves the Firefox Homepage (I do!), or more specifically, they don’t like some of the panels. We added a simple way for people to control the panels shown in Firefox’s Homepage. You can change the default panel. You can even hide all the panels. Use Settings > Customize > Home to get there.

Improve Top Sites
The Top Sites panel in the Homepage is used by many people. At the same time, other people find that the thumbnails can reveal a bit too much of their browsing to others. We recently added support for respecting sites that might not want to be snapshot into thumbnails. In those cases, the thumbnail is replaced with a favicon and a favicon-influenced background color. The Facebook and Twitter thumbnails show the effect below:

We also added the ability to remove thumbnails using the long-tap menu.

Manage Search Engines
People also like to be able to manage their search engines. They like to switch the default. They like to hide some of the built-in engines. They like to add new engines. We have a simple system for managing search engines. Use Settings > Customize > Search to get there.

Clear History
We have a lot of feedback from people who want to clear their browsing history quickly and easily. We are not sure if the Settings > Privacy > Clear private data method is too hard to find or too time consuming to use, but it’s apparent people need other methods. We added a quick access method at the bottom of the History panel in the Homepage.

We are also working on a Clear data on exit approach too.

Quickly Switch to a Newly Opened Tab
When you long-tap on a link in a webpage, you get a menu that allows you to Open in New Tab or Open in New Private Tab. Both of those open the new tab in the background. Feedback indicates the some people really want to switch to the new tab. We already show an Android toast to let you know the tab was opened. Now we add a button to the toast allowing you to quickly switch to the tab too.

Undo Closing a Tab
Closing tabs can be awkward for people. Sometimes the [x] is too easy to hit by mistake or swiping to close is unexpected. In any case, we added the ability to undo closing a tab. Again, we use a button toast.

Offer to Setup Sync from Tabs Tray
We feel that syncing your desktop and mobile browsing data makes browsing on mobile devices much easier. Figuring out how to setup the Sync feature in Firefox might not be obvious. We added a simple banner to the Homepage to let you know the feature exists. We also added a setup entry point in the Sync area of the Tabs Tray.

We’ll continue to make changes based on your feedback, so keep sending it to us. Thanks for using Firefox for Android!